Happy Birthday Karen – Parte Zwei

I promised there would be more Karen-Birthday Party posts, it just took awhile for the party to take place. Yesterday, we finally had the party of the century (or at least the year).

Our friends Om and Sarita came over to help us make Momo. Yum. I want some momo. And they gave Karen her very own Momo pan for her birthday! Now we just have to learn their secrets, which they seem hesitant to share. At one point we had about 10 people in our closet of a kitchen making Momo, tortillas, whipping cream, and chopping lettuce & onions. Good fun!

You might think that’s a cake. But not in this family! Instead of a cake, Karen got a 4 pound pile of chicken and lamb kebab meat with candles on top. The best part is, if you look closely Mia is getting ready to blow out the candles too. It’s great how whenever you look at pictures of kids near birthday candles the expressions on their faces tell you exactly what they’re thinking!

Here’s Everton (from Chris’ class) and Karen posing with their Kebabs.

We had a lot of people over. Usually when we invite people, half of them don’t show up. This time almost everyone showed up and we had 19 adults and 9 kids in our very small european apartment.

The evening was made even more exciting by the addition of American soda that Bindi brought us from the U.N. commissary.

Elder Bailey was really excited to carve pumpkins, so he searched all over Vienna to find a large enough pumpkin to carve. Since Everton is from Brazil and has never carved a pumpkin, we made him and his wife Andrea carve one.

Here’s Elora helping out Andrea trace the shape to be carved into the pumpkin. Andrea actually did a better job than we’ve ever done in our lifetime of pumpkin carving… Looks like America needs to outsource our pumpkin carving to Brazil!

Here’s Elder Burgoyne playing a fun game I invented called Trifle Pong. It’s pretty much like the college-frat-guys-who-drink-too-much game called Beer Pong. Only we used dessert instead of Beer.

Jason was by far the most photogenic Trifle Pong player.

“Chris perfecting his patented ‘claw throw’ Trifle Pong technique.”

Om was definitely the best Trifle Pong player. He had this reverse soft-ball pitch style that yielded consistent results.

The birthday girl, true to her form, tossed the ping pong ball like a girl and missed by a mile. But she still got to eat some Trifle anyway.

In keeping with the stereotype of frat boy games, the men seemed more interested, while the women mostly gathered around and watched while eating Trifle.

Our first attempt at a group photo. The lens wasn’t wide enough to fit everyone in so we had to retry.

Just barely!

One more try to get all the kids in the picture. Elora refused to comply. Everyone agreed that Momo is the best thing in the world, and we’re now going to expand our future Kebab restaurant into a Kebab & Momo Hut.